One of the legends of the Marquette University Law School is that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of organized baseball, was once a professor at the school. As it turns out, the story is true, at least sort of.

When the Marquette University College of Law opened for its first full year in the fall of 1908, it consisted of two divisions. One was an evening division that was really just a continuation of the Milwaukee Law School, a night law school acquired by Marquette in the spring of 1908. The new day division offered a more expansive curriculum leading to an LLB degree after three years of study.

The new law school was headed by Judge James G. Jenkins, a retired federal circuit court judge who had earlier been affiliated with the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. While Jenkins was a full-time dean, the University lacked the resources for a full-time faculty, so it relied upon the part-time faculty of the Milwaukee Law School and a few additional lawyers and judges from the city. However, to add a special element to the education provided by the new law school, the University announced that there would also be a group of distinguished lecturers who would not teach full-length courses, but who would visit the law school during the year and lecture on special topics.

Listed as one of the lecturers in the 1909 law school bulletin was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, then a federal district court judge in Chicago, best known for several large damage judgments awarded against large corporations in antitrust cases.  Landis had argued a number of cases before Jenkins as a lawyer and had been appointed to the bench by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, several years before Jenkins’s retirement.

Although Landis’s involvement with organized baseball was more than a decade in the future, he was already well known as a great fan of baseball and a partisan of the Chicago Cubs. (A famous picture shows Landis barely able to contain his rage at the 1906 World Series, in which his heavily favored Cubs were upset by their cross-town rivals, the White Sox.)

It appears that Landis delivered only a single lecture at Marquette, and it came near the end of the 1908-09 academic year. On May 21, after a lengthy colloquy on the status of baseball in Wisconsin, Landis launched into a lecture on “Public Criticism of the Judiciary,” in which he expressed his opposition to proposals that would penalize those who criticized the actions of individual judges. In rejecting the argument that placing judges above the world of criticism would make the judiciary more respected, he turned to a baseball analogy. “I have been going to baseball games for 30 years,” Landis told his student audience. “I never saw a game or heard of one where somebody did not call the umpire a robber or a thief, and yet no intelligent man doubts the integrity of baseball.” By the same logic, intemperate denunciations of individual judges, even if untrue, would not tarnish the image of the judiciary, at least in the eyes of intelligent observers.

As Landis’s biographer David Pietrusza has noted, in 1909, Landis considered several of his fellow federal judges in Chicago to be incompetent and corrupt, so he had reasons to support the shining of the public spotlight on his colleagues. He was particularly angry with Judge Peter Grosscup of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, who the year before had written the decision overturning Landis’s attempt to fine Standard Oil $29 million. In his opinion, Grosscup had accused Landis of “arbitrary” decision-making and of believing himself to be “above the law.” As accusations of Grosscup’s personal impropriety began to surface, one can imagine that Landis was not completely disappointed.

Landis’ speech was covered in detail by all of the Milwaukee newspapers, but it appears to have attracted little attention elsewhere, although it was reported in the American Law Review, a leading periodical of the day.

The May 21 address, however, marked the end of Landis’s affiliation with Marquette, and his name disappeared from the list of lecturers in the 1910 law school bulletin.

Nevertheless, when Bud Selig lectures in Matt Mitten’s Professional Sports Law class each spring, he is the second, not the first, of baseball’s Commissioners to offer instruction at the Marquette Law School.

For many years, the program for the Marquette University Law School commencement has identified the Law School’s origin with the establishment of the Milwaukee Law Class in 1892. In fact, in 1992, the law school celebrated its centennial based on this assumption. According to the conventional account, the Milwaukee Law Class was begun by a group of young Milwaukeeans preparing for the Wisconsin bar who wished to meet together to study and to listen to lectures from established members of the bench and bar. Over the next several years, the Milwaukee Law Class evolved into the Milwaukee Law School, which was taken over by Marquette in 1908.

The only problem with this story is that several contemporary (to the 1890’s) sources identified the school’s date of origin as a year other than 1892.

First of all, the Milwaukee Law Class of 1892, which clearly existed, was not the first such group in Milwaukee. In 1885, the Wisconsin legislature made bar passage a good bit more difficult when it removed the licensing authority from state’s circuit court judges and vested it in a single state board of bar examiners. The examiners met at specified times — unlike the judges who could schedule examinations at any time and who were notoriously lax in their administration — and from a very early date (possibly 1885) administered the examination in written form.

To pass such an examination one had to know what the law was in a variety of areas, something that was not necessarily easy to learn while working as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. (Only graduates of the law program at the University of Wisconsin were exempt from the examination.) The Milwaukee Sentinel reported the organization of a “law class” in Milwaukee as early April of 1886, so there is no reason to think that the 1892 law class was unique. There were probably several “law classes” begun between 1885 and 1892.

The Milwaukee Law School was a fairly low-key institution, and in fact does not even show up in the Milwaukee city directory until 1903. The first recorded reference that we have to the Milwaukee Law School is in the 1897 report of the United States Commissioner of Education, and that publication lists the year of the school’s founding as 1893. The 1893 date was repeated in subsequent volumes of the Commissioner’s Report and in the 1907 Annual Report of the American Bar Association, which compiled data on the nation’s law schools. In 1921, when Alfred Zantzinger Reed compiled his monumental report on the history of legal education in the United States, he accepted 1893 as the date of the school’s founding.

However, the 1906 Milwaukee Law School catalog, a copy of which is in the collection of the Milwaukee Historical Society, identifies the school as beginning not in 1892 or 1893, but in 1894. In contrast, an article in the 1907 American Educational Review listed the Milwaukee Law School as beginning in 1892, with the Milwaukee Law Class. Former Marquette Dean Robert Boden (1968-1984) wrote in his unpublished history of the early years of the Law School that the Milwaukee Law School took that name in 1896. Although Boden was extremely knowledgeable about the history of the Law School, the source that he cites for the 1896 date actually makes no such claim.

So, did the Milwaukee Law School begin in 1892, 1893, 1894, or 1896? The question is further complicated by the fact that the school operated without a legislative charter until 1908 — since it did not award law degrees, it did not need one. It finally obtained a state charter only so that it could more easily sell itself to Marquette University. (Since it had no building and no library, the charter at least gave it something to transfer along with its good will and name recognition.)

Here is what I think happened. Among the members of the 1892 Milwaukee Law Class, which was not the first such organization in Milwaukee, was William Churchill, newly arrived in Milwaukee from Michigan, where he had already been admitted to the bar. Churchill helped out with the lectures in 1892, and the following year he joined forces with Edward Spencer, an Ohio-educated lawyer, who had returned to his native Milwaukee that year to operate the family-owned Spencerian Business College, where he taught commercial law. Since Spencer was already in the business of non-degree-granting business education, it was a logical extension of his operation to offer training in law for a fee. Moreover, since the Spencerian Business College already rented a number of rooms in a downtown Milwaukee office building for its classes, the same rooms were available to the proprietors at no additional charge.

Spencer and Churchill simply converted the informal educational setting of the law class into a money-making proposition. Because both were members of the bar, and presumably capable teachers, would-be lawyers were willing to pay for their instruction.

Regardless of when the two adopted the name Milwaukee Law School for their enterprise, the key change was charging their students for the benefit of the lectures. This change presumably happened in 1893, the year that Spencer arrived in Milwaukee. This is presumably why the Commissioner of Education used 1893 as the date of the school’s founding.

It also seems likely that the two began calling their “school” the Milwaukee Law School in 1894, hence the school catalog’s use of 1894 as the date of the institution’s beginning. Spencer and Churchill were joined by former University of Wisconsin law professor Lynn Pease in 1897, and the three of them operated the Milwaukee Law School until it merged with Marquette in the summer of 1908. (In fact, the three made up the bulk of the original faculty of the Marquette University College of Law after the merger.)

It is also easy to understand how that over time William Churchill, who remained affiliated with Marquette for several decades after 1908 and who lived until 1954, came to associate the founding of the Law School with his participation in the 1892 Milwaukee Law Class, which coincided with his arrival in the Cream City. Churchill’s account, which was not contradicted by Spencer, took on added force as he outlived all of the members of the 1892 law class who might have contradicted his version.

In fact, a 1941 obituary for lawyer John J. Gregory, published in the Wisconsin Reports, gives an entirely different account of the organization of the Milwaukee Law Class which makes no reference to Churchill or Spencer, and which implies that the Milwaukee Law Class may already have been in existence when Churchill arrived in Milwaukee in 1892.

At this point, it doesn’t really matter, but it seems to me that the founding year ought to be either 1886, the year of the first Milwaukee Law Class (actually called the Milwaukee Law Student Association), or 1893, the year that Churchill and Spencer started charging for legal instruction. If we opt for 1886, then we are only a year away from the 125th anniversary of the founding of an alternative to law-office education in Milwaukee.

Most people remember Paul Robeson as a star of stage and screen and as a controversial African-American civil rights leader of the early and mid-twentieth century.  His performances in “Othello,” “The Emperor Jones,” and “Show Boat” are legendary, as are his renditions of “Old Man River” and the classic Negro spirituals. His support of radical politics and his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union made him a highly controversial figure during the Cold War.

However, before he became famous as an actor and an activist, Robeson was a law student and a professional football player, a combination that brought him to the Marquette College of Law in the fall of 1922.

Here is the story.

Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, and came of age at the height of the Jim Crow era in the United States.  He was a superb student in the public schools of Somerville, New Jersey, and he was offered a full academic scholarship by Rutgers University at which he enrolled in 1915.  At the time of his enrollment he was only the third African-American to have attended Rutgers, and he was the only black student at the school during the four years in which he was enrolled.

Few college students have ever excelled at the level at which Robeson performed at Rutgers.  He graduated first in his class; was elected Phi Beta Kappa as a junior; and won the college’s oratory contest each year that he was enrolled.  He also won twelve varsity letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track.  His best sport was football, in which he was a first team All-American end in 1917 and 1918.

After graduating from Rutgers in 1919, he moved to New York where he enrolled at the New York University Law School.  After a semester at NYU, he transferred to Columbia, at least in part because of its proximity to Harlem (and the just-underway Harlem Renaissance).

To support himself while in law school, Robeson played for two seasons in the National Football League (or the American Professional Football Association, as it was initially known.)  In 1921, he played for the Akron Indians, which were led by player-coach Fritz Pollard, the great running back and the first African-American to coach a predominantly white professional team. Robeson, who played in eight of Akron’s 12 games in 1921, apparently commuted to Akron’s weekend games from New York City.

In 1922, Pollard jumped to the Milwaukee Badgers and apparently convinced Robeson to join him.  The Badgers, who joined the NFL that year, played their home games in Borchert Park, the home of the minor league baseball team, the Milwaukee Brewers.  Robeson apparently decided that a weekly commute to Milwaukee would be too difficult, so he took a leave of absence from Columbia Law School that fall.

The 1922 Milwaukee Badgers began their season on October 1.  On October 17, the Milwaukee Journal ran a story under the heading: “Robeson, Giant Pro End, in M.U. Law Dept.”  (Robeson was 6’3” tall and weighed approximately 220 lbs. at that point in his life, which apparently qualified as “giant-size” under the standards of 1922.) The brief story went on to report that Robeson “has taken up a course of review and research work in Marquette university school of law [sic], preparatory to taking the New York state bar examinations late this year.”  Counting his semester at New York University, Robeson had already attended law school for three years, so he was already eligible to take the New York bar examination.  In 1922, most states required applicants for admission to the bar to have only a specific number of years of legal education rather than a law degree.

While the Journal story seems to suggest that Robeson may have enrolled at the law school, the law school bulletins for 1922 and 1923 do not list Robeson as a student in the fall of 1922, and he is similarly absent from the records of the university registrar.

Robeson’s affiliation with the law school was likely somewhat informal. In the 1920’s, several professors at the Marquette Law School offered “bar prep” courses for students who were preparing to take the Wisconsin bar exam.  (The diploma privilege was not extended to Marquette until 1934.)  Normally these classes were held after the end of the academic year and just before the summer bar examination. Such classes were technically not offered by the law school, but by individual professors, and thus were open to anyone interested in taking the Wisconsin bar examination.  (A decade later, criticism led to the law school requesting its faculty to stop doing this.)

Robeson likely worked out a similar arrangement with one of the Marquette law professors, and this is what the newspaper meant when it referred to a “course of review and research work.”  So far as we know, none of the Marquette professors in 1922 were members of the New York bar, but John McDill Fox was a graduate of Harvard Law School who had been successfully passed the Massachusetts bar exam.  Given that Fox was one of the professors who regularly offered bar prep courses to supplement his income, he would seem to be the most likely candidate to have directed Robeson’s studies that fall.

(There is an eerie literary parallel here.  In Eugene O’Neill’s play, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” a black law student named Jim Harris struggles desperately to pass his law school exams and secure admission to the bar.  In the play’s first performance in 1924, Robeson was cast in the role of Jim Harris.  There is no reason, however, to believe that Robeson knew about the play in the fall of 1922.)

The article also suggests that in the fall of 1922 Robeson was more concerned about the NY bar exam than credits to graduate from Columbia.  In any event, the Fall 1922 football season turned out to be a disappointment.  Pollard battled injuries throughout the season, and while the Badgers held their opponents to 31 points in their first eight games, they had great difficulty scoring.  For the season the team managed only seven touchdowns, one of which was scored by Robeson on a fumble recovery.  Robeson missed the season opener, then played in seven games before skipping the season finale, a 40-6 trouncing by the Canton Bulldogs.  For the year, the Badgers won two, lost four, and tied three games, with a 10^th game rained out but not rescheduled.

After the season, Robeson returned to New York and re-enrolled at Columbia.  He graduated from the law school in the spring of 1923 as a member of a class that also included future U.S. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas.  Already immersed in his theatrical career, he apparently never got around to taking the New York bar examination, and he never again played in the National Football League.

The Milwaukee Badgers lasted until the end of the 1926 NFL season when they folded after a dismal 2-7-0 season.  In their final year, their roster included third-year Marquette law student Lavvie Dilweg who went on to a highly successful career with the Green Bay Packers and a seat in the United States Congress.

Can we say that Robeson attended the Marquette Law School?  Probably not, but he was one of many fascinating individuals whose lives have intersected with our institution.